ABSTRACT: RESEARCH PROJECT #2 Manuscripts submitted to medical journals are typically reviewed by physicians or researchers, with no input from patients or other community members. However, involvement of community members in other phases of the research process suggests that they provide distinct and useful expertise. Such involvement may lead to enhanced understanding of community priorities, refinement of study designs to minimize participant burden, and increased recruitment and retention of subjects. In general, community involvement in research is more common in the earlier phases of the research process (selection of research question and development of a study protocol) and less common in later phases (dissemination and implementation of findings). We conducted a pilot study that recruited and trained community members to review medical journal manuscripts. We found that community reviewers were much more likely than scientific reviewers to comment on i) the relevance of the study to patients and communities, ii) the diversity and complexity of the study participants, iii) the social context of the condition studied, and iv) barriers to implementation of study findings by patients and communities. We now seek to rigorously determine the impact of community members reviewing medical journal manuscripts. We propose a randomized controlled trial involving 16 community members who will receive training and mentoring in reviewing manuscripts. To ensure that the perspectives of health disparity populations are well represented, at least 75% of participants will be racial/ethnic minorities, be sexual/gender minorities, or have a low socioeconomic status. A total of 568 manuscripts submitted to 2 medical journals will be randomly assigned to an intervention or control group. Intervention manuscripts will be reviewed by both a community member and by scientific reviewers while control manuscripts will be reviewed only by scientific reviewers. Journal editorial teams will use all reviews to help them make decisions about acceptance, revision, or rejection of manuscripts. Quantitative and qualitative analyses will i) compare the content of community and scientific reviews, ii) determine the usefulness of community reviews to journal editors, and iii) explore how community reviewer comments are integrated into published articles. The proposed project is a novel approach to engaging health disparity populations and other community members in dissemination of research findings. This approach has the potential to provide new and distinct perspectives, to increase the quality and relevance of articles published in medical journals, and to enhance dissemination and implementation of research findings.